New Ballistic Neutron Guide for the Time-of-Flight Spectrometer FOCUS at PSI

Abstract

FOCUS is a direct-geometry cold neutron time-of-flight spectrometer at SINQ (PSI, CH). Its neutron guide was exchanged in 2019/2020 within the SINQ Upgrade project, while the rest of the instrument remained unchanged. The new guide provided a significant intensity increase across the whole spectrum, especially at short wavelengths, due to the more efficient transport and extended phase space of the transported neutrons. The practically available energy transfer range (at the neutron energy loss side) was increased to about 40 meV. The main reason for the intensity benefit at short incident wavelengths was the improved guide coating, whereas at long wavelengths it was the new ballistic shape. The interesting part of the guide is the “peanut shape” of the curved part in the horizontal plane. For this, we derived the analytical restriction on the geometry to avoid a direct line of sight from the source. The guide geometry and the supermirror coating were optimized using Mcoptimize, a particle swarm optimization routine employing Mcstas. Future ballistic neutron guides may profit from the presented approaches, optimization strategy, and results.